Wikipedia:Peer review/Paeanius/archive1

Paeanius

I've listed this article for peer review because I've rewritten it today and want to make it into a Featured Article at some point. I'm hoping for suggestions of all kind, most importantly on matters of style as I am not a native speaker. Also, is there some aspect of the article topic I might have missed?

Looking forward to your suggestions! Many thanks in advance, Jonathan Groß (talk) 14:41, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

UndercoverClassicist

Will give this a proper look later on: I have a little bit of knowledge on Late Antiquity, but must admit to having never heard of this particular character before reading the article. Some isolated initial thoughts:

• Use the demonym late Roman rather than late Roman Empire [historian, painter, butcher...]
• For an FA, we really want to cite everything: a big chunk of the second paragraph is missing one.
• In general, we don't want to hang anything solely on a primary source (WP:PRIMARY): however, we can cite a secondary source which effectively endorses that primary source, and then mention or cite the primary source as well.
• I'm not convinced about the aorist participle per se implying recent death, only that it means that they had died, and therefore, in context, that they died some time in "our own age".
• I appreciate that scholarship doesn't always move too fast, but it's best to cite the most modern material we can: works from 1870 will raise some eyebrows if used for matters of fact or interpretation.
• Spell out words in full: does not rather than doesn't.
• It's always good to introduce new people (like Libanius and Otto Seeck) with a few words about who they are or were.
• Why such a long Further Reading section? If those sources have useful material, it should be in the article and so they should be in the bibliography.
• There seems to be quite a bit of information in the German version of this article that could be incorporated.

More to follow. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 06:30, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

More follows:

• Per MOS:LEAD, the lead section is intended to be a summary and shorter version of the rest of the article, not an introduction in the usual sense. The typical policy is to mentally reduce each section or so of the body to its key facts: the lead can then be formed by stringing those together.
• The MOS, unlike most classicist, prefers e.g. Paeanius's to Paeanius'.
• You'll be advised to add alt text to images at FAC.
• File:Ms. Iviron 812, fol. 1recto.jpg needs some licensing attention. Firstly, it doesn't have a US PD tag: secondly, we need to show both that the object itself is public domain (trivial) and that the photograph of it is (more difficult).
• File:Antiochia su Oronte.PNG could really do with some information as to the data from which it is constructed, though I'm not sure that would be a make-or-break issue for this article.

@UndercoverClassicist: Thanks for your comments! I have already acted on some of them. For others I shall refer to my bibliography. Paeanius has been neglected by scholars for a long time, and Schulze 1870 is still the most exhaustive treatment (apart from Trivolis 1941, but he repeated a lot of Schulze's arguments). As for the items listed under "further reading", I could incorporate them in the text in some way, e.g. in two sections named "Relationship with the Latin original" and "Scholarly appraisal" / "Reception by scholarship" respectively. The problem is that Venini, Fisher and Matino all add little to nothing to our knowledge of the subject.

Regarding the German version (which I wrote 3 years ago): It is longer, but not necessarily better than my rewrite of the English article. It gives a good survey of the subject matter but it is skewed towards the textual aspects (bordering on pedantry). If you think it useful, I could expand the section on Paeanius' reception (with subsections for early reception, manuscript transmission, dissemination in the West and scholarly reception / use in schools) and add a section on the translation's relationship with the Latin original (see above). I could also give a few examples of his translation style, but that may be out of scope for an encyclopedia article. What do you think? Jonathan Groß (talk) 15:09, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

Further Reading sections are caught in a bit of a dilemma: either the works in them have something to say, and so should be cited, or they have nothing to add, and so there's no reason to direct a reader towards them. There is a certain value in "rounding out" the bibliography: if, for instance, the same uncontroversial fact is stated both by Schulze and by Venini, there's an argument for citing it to Venini to make sure that that he gets into the bibliography, and to demonstrate to the reader that we have indeed consulted and used that source (including it in Further Reading, by contrast, often means that we couldn't consult that source but are hoping that a future editor will be able to).

Personally, I think an expanded section on reception would be extremely helpful. I'd be more circumspect about giving examples of his style: the key consideration there would be to make sure that your observations had already been made in secondary sources, though I at least wouldn't have a problem with selecting appropriate bits of Paeanius' work which unambiguously illustrate the observations that scholars have made. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 15:21, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the additional comments. Just a quick reply: Venini (and Malcovati, Matino, Fisher = all scholars having published on Paeanius since 1943) are female, so she would be the preferable pronoun. Jonathan Groß (talk) 09:05, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Thank you - all the more reason to cite them, perhaps. There's also something useful about citing a more recent source, even if the older source says the same thing and even uses the same evidence: citing it to a more recent source demonstrates that it (probably) hasn't been debunked, overturned or otherwise obsoleted in the intervening years, where an 1870 citation doesn't. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 09:14, 15 September 2023 (UTC)